New federal awards

New Department, Editors, and Awards

I’m pleased to introduce new editorial board members Bernd Froehlich and Mark Livingston, who will be the editors of the upcoming Spatial Interfaces department. Bernd Froehlich is a full professor on the media faculty at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His group performs basic and applied research in multiuser virtual reality; 2D and 3D user interfaces; visualization and rendering algorithms for ve...

New Federal Roles in Education

n the recent presidential campaign, Governor George W. Bush insisted he was not running for the job of federal superintendent of schools. Yet he regularly discussed education issues (like testing, or how and when to teach reading) that have not previously been within the scope of federal responsibility. Meanwhile,Vice-President Al Gore made no efforts to abjure intervention in state and local e...

Image awards

Why is the mirror neuron system so controversial? About a dozen papers have reported direct evidence for mirror neuron activity in monkeys and birds. Approximately 100 times as many papers refer to mirror neurons without directly recording their activity, often implying a link between mirror neurons and higher cognitive functions. While the existence of mirror neurons in animals is beyond doubt...

Merit awards.

A new federal health care strategy.

patients examined in this study were taking cholinesterase inhibitors and 22% took memantine. Without strong empirical data, clinical judgmentmust rule.DavidKnopman,MD, a professor of neurology at theMayoClinic in Rochester, Minnesota, usually opts to continue cholinesterase inhibitors for patients withdementiawho liveathomebecausehe doesn’t want to run the risk of precipitating decline.But if ...